Tintin Cooper
Banana Ghost

selected works installation views

13 Sep - 8 Nov 2025
SAC Gallery Bangkok

In BANANA GHOST artist TINTIN COOPER explores how Thailand and the wider Southeast Asian region are imagined through foreign eyes, and how locals in turn navigate the constant tide of visitors to their tourism-saturated beaches, cities, and provinces. At the same time, it considers the preconceived notions locals hold toward visitors, whether they are tourists or migrant workers. These pervasive fantasies are deeply informed by the artist’s lived experience as a person of Thai and English background.

The language of tropical fantasy is manifest across BANANA GHOST. This vernacular is stretched and distorted through repetition, much like the viral nature of memes themselves. Here, we encounter “passport bros” weeping in paradise, subjects caught beneath the wrath of a tropical landscape, awash in the lush colors and “ethnic” patterns of the region, and populated with nods to Thai wildlife: tigers, the famed pygmy hippo MooDeng, and sinuous snakes.

Elsewhere, the extraterrestrial puppet Alf clutches a cat sandwich, a sly nod to Western meme culture where cuteness collides with absurdity. Across the surface, this absurdity meets the charged words of Donald Trump: “The aliens, they’re eating cats, they’re eating the dogs.” What begins as a throwaway jibe revives a familiar stereotype about immigrant communities and the consumption of pets. Around this time, headlines appeared throughout Thai news accusing visitors to Thailand of the same heinous activity. Creating the twisted mirror of how both the East and West manifest suspicions around unfamiliar cultures and the subhuman actions we assign to them through the process of othering.

Full exhibition text English / Thai (pdf)